The Internet is still buzzing over Ellen DeGeneres’ celebrity-packed Oscar selfie taken at the Academy Awards Sunday night, which garnered more than two million retweets and temporarily crashed Twitter.

The photo, which was taken by academy award-nominee Bradley Cooper, looked like the ensemble cast of a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster. The picture featured Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence and quickly shattered the previous retweet record of more than 781,000 held by a picture of Barack Obama embracing the first lady shortly after his 2012 re-election.

But DeGeneres’ high-profile self-snap is only the latest development for the smartphone-based self-portraiture medium.

Researchers, social scholars and data scientists created “Selfiecity,” an interactive website devoted to the analysis of more than 3,200 selfies taken in five cities throughout the world — Bangkok, New York City, Moscow, Sao Paulo and Berlin. The project analyzes Instagram photos by factors including age, expression, head tilt and mood.

The majority of images analyzed were from Instagram users between the ages of 18 and 24. The age group was chosen because younger people tend to take more photos of themselves than older people do, says Mehrdad Yazdani, a data scientist and researcher at the University of California at San Diego who helped with the project.

There were a variety of regional differences, Yazdani says. For example, college-aged Instagram users in Sao Paulo smile more often than users in Moscow. Users in Bangkok are more likely to take pictures of just their faces, while people in Moscow often snap images of their entire body.

Gender and age distribution of the selfies also varies between cities.

In Moscow, 82% were taken by women, compared to 59% in Berlin. Bangkok had some of the youngest selfie takers — 20 — around two or three years younger than the other cities.

“Selfiecity” is a fascinating project, but it does have its limitations, says Elizabeth Losh, a professor at the University of California at San Diego who wrote an essay for the project. Among these is the fact that the project only includes self-portraits that depict one person and avoids groups.

Studying how Instagram users present themselves on social media tells researchers more about how and why people choose to document their lives in public, Losh says. This digital documentation helps people learn about the way they are perceived, but it can also confuse people into thinking the persona they record online is more authentic than who they are in real life.

“The problem with this is. . . that numbers tell us something more accurate than the sense of ourselves that we get from social interactions,” Losh says.

In general, selfies posted by college students tend to be less elegant than many of the self-portraits studied for “Selfiecity,” Losh writes in an email.

“From my cursory viewing, some of the subjects appear less polished than the sophisticated urbanites projected in ‘Selfiecity,’ because the visitor can see things like dorm beds or beer bottles in the frame,” Losh writes. “Nonetheless, you still see many of the same types of poses of reflection or contemplation, as though mobile self-photography is an activity to take seriously.”

And students aren’t the only ones on campus using selfies to present themselves to the public, she says. Faculty members often post pictures of themselves attending conferences or traveling to establish their status as accomplished scholars. In some cases, Losh has seen professors using selfies for their official university photos.

For Regina Ham, a senior broadcast journalism major at the University of Maryland, selfies are a way to share the things she’s wearing or capture an event. She says she posts photos online to express herself, not because she wants gratification or attention.

“I usually take selfies of my face, my outfit or me with a few friends while we’re out and about,” wrote Ham, whose current Facebook profile picture is a selfie. “They aren’t anything gross or inappropriate.”

While posting selfies and records of daily activities often help college-aged social media users express themselves, Losh believes sharing too much can be isolating–especially if the information is regarded as personal.

“I honestly don’t want to know how many bananas you ate today,” she says. “But if you post it to your social media site, I won’t have a choice.”